IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
However, most of the time when we talk about virtual, augmented, or even mixed reality, we immediately think of visual features, whereas the new goal for developers is to create a kind of augmented auditory reality. Today, a good portion of virtual reality videos and simulations still lack 360º audio, so professionals like sound designers have been thinking about what the future of sound would be like in its immersive potential, including combinations with technologies such as artificial intelligence, sensors, and wearable devices.
This is the case for hearables, a possibility that has been envisioned since 2014, when smart bracelets began to gain fame before smartwatches conquered the market. It was product designer Nick Hunn who initiated this speculation as part of his campaign for wireless devices that make screens dispensable as technology becomes wearable or even part of our bodies.
Smart headphones like Doppler's Here One, Nuheara's IQBuds, and Google's recently announced Pixel Buds are some of the examples that demonstrate advanced developments in the field of hearing devices. The goal now, therefore, is to make these same devices capable of providing a "soundtrack" experience for their users' lives—that is, to truly enable an immersive and seamless.
That is, more than just the wireless headphones from Apple, also envisioned in the film Herby Spike Jonze, these hearing devices would be capable of canceling out external sound or increasing the volume of specific noises, selected by the user through interaction with smartphone apps. There is even speculation that it would be possible to create a "live mix" of the world around us, combining artificial intelligence features that could, for example, edit noises according to a chosen musical scale, as well as allow music streaming platforms like Spotify to be linked to the analysis of the user's bodily responses, thus suggesting the perfect soundtrack to keep you motivated while working out or to cheer you up on a Monday morning after a long holiday weekend.
Many of these features can already be found in some of the headphones available today, but just like the lenses in the episode "The Entire History of You"from Black Mirror, these devices are not yet capable of recording memories—in this case, auditory ones. This, however, may become a new addition to devices that will allow their users to record sounds they wish to revisit later, whether to enjoy the memory or even to use them as samples to be remixed into an experimental soundtrack.
By the way, when it comes to technology and soundtracks, it is worth mentioning how Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch worked on composing a soundscape so dark and noisy as much as the very setting created for Blade Runner 2049, by Denis Villeneuve.
When choosing Zimmer to compose the score for the sequel to the film directed by Ridley Scott, Villeneuve treated the German composer's involvement as a kind of laboratory experiment: “The film needed something different. I needed something close to Vangelis.” The result was, ultimately, what editor Michael Roffman wrote in his reviewas being “a total evolution of what Vangelis did back in 1982. It’s louder, it’s moodier, it’s heavier, it’s much more expansive, all the qualities one would give to Villeneuve’s stunning sequel.”
There isn't exactly a melody, but rather noises—something like a less aggressive, yet still strange version when compared to the experiments of noise music from the 80s, whether in its Western iteration linked to industrial music, or how the genre developed in the East starting from the japanoisescene. Bands like Nurse with Wound, for example, are capable of providing the same ambient sense of unease that Zimmer and Wallfisch brought to Blade Runner with a touch of Vangelis’s synthesizers, which are constantly paid homage to by the new wave of retrowave.
artists. With new possibilities for remixing city sounds, perhaps we will have a new perception and appreciation for noises once reserved for more avant-garde experiments among musicians. On the other hand, smart headphones capable of providing us with real-time audio information could work paired with GPS, offering tips on the nearest restaurant, or becoming a strong ally for gamified experiences. That is, have you ever imagined if, instead of walking around with your phone in your hand waiting for a Pokémon to appear, you could hear when a new one pops up nearby while listening to your music or the news?
These were speculations brought up by Jesse Damiani in his recent article for Billboard, but they are nonetheless a technology easily assimilable into the universe of nowpunk Black Mirror-esque pessimism, as if these hearables could, for example, be contaminated by the advertising messages that swarm our ears just like the pop-ups of old and the current banners that we so desperately want to ignore with adblock services.
InBlade Runner 2049, Villeneuve bet on a city as polluted by holographic advertising as the 80s original, but he also didn't fail to appropriate the city's sound to fill it with more and more invasive messages, shouts, and insults in a tenement as typical and vivid in the cyberpunk imagination. As soon as K (Ryan Gosling) enters his apartment, however, the sound of the outside world gives way to a silence that he fills with old music. The difference is that, with hearables, we will be able to find silence even in the middle of traffic and cancel out car horns with our favorite music. Or would we be so immersed in new layers so dissolved into our sensory perception that we would populate silent cities, just like in the non-animated world of The Congress?
